Authors: Project Itoh
They eat their Muslim captives, right? No, they worship an idol made out of an unused nuclear warhead and decorate it with the ears of their victims as offerings.
These tall tales might have seemed ridiculous, but it was amazing how quickly people reverted from being rational purveyors of information to Chinese whisperers when lines of communication were cut off. When soldiers were garrisoned in the asshole of the world, in the boiling heat, surrounded by hostile forest and with the threat of an unknown enemy constantly looming, it was almost inevitable that stories would be born about the horrors of war.
Stories of the brutality and inhumanity of the unknown enemy were par for the course during war. So were ghost stories. Ghost ships, ghost submarines, ghosts of German soldiers haunting Lithuanian forests. Which was why I was hardly surprised that ghost stories had sprung up here too: tales of swarms of ghosts of massacred Buddhist and Muslim villagers who roamed the forest by night. These were passed on from sentry to sentry.
Why did soldiers fear the imaginary dead when real death was always around them?
Why should a submarine traversing enemy waters be worried about ghost submarines when they faced the very real threat of an unknown enemy minefield that could blow them out of the water at any minute? Why should a soldier stuck in the trenches worry about ghostly comrades beckoning him to the land of the dead when he was up against the real risk of a deadly hail of mortar fire? And yet people could always find ways of being afraid of the dead. Even on the battlefield, where life couldn’t get any more real, people found ways of believing in fictions—or is “delusions” a better word?—that could shock them to their existential core.
There had been a number of times when I wondered whether John Paul was such a delusion—a figment of my imagination that I had invented to scare myself. A ghostly figure who traversed the world to spread a trail of death in his wake. A mythical monster created out of human fears. After all, even though I had captured the man who called himself John Paul, I couldn’t feel any sense of closure. Could this mild-mannered scholar’s
a capella
song really have been the catalyst for all that death?
Dawn broke, and we climbed into a doubly reinforced Stryker to begin our six-hour journey to the nearest railway station. We used KO pads to keep our captives unconscious for the duration of the journey, so when the time came to wake them up and bundle them out, their muscles had gone to sleep. The prisoners did what they could to loosen up their stiff joints as we roughed them out of the vehicle and onto the platform. One of the prisoners moaned about how we were abusing prisoners of war. He was one of the Indian generals who had given the order to use nuclear warheads on unarmed civilian targets.
“Kneel!” Leland’s battle cell lined the prisoners up along the railway platform. The prisoners were made to kneel, and we kept a close watch on them. If any of them wanted to escape they would have to stand up first, one leg after another. Not too easy when you had eagle eyes watching your every move.
The prisoners stayed in position until they found themselves looking up at an old diesel engine pulling into the station. We had the front three carriages to ourselves, sandwiched by police wagons, and the rear carriages of the train were crammed full of passengers on their way to Mumbai. There were even passengers on the roof. A scene that epitomized this desperately poor country.
I wondered why these people were heading to Mumbai. Were they trying to escape the clutches of Hindu India or just fleeing from grinding rural poverty? I thought of the shantytowns where the laundry workers lived and worked and the slums on either side of the railway line. Was that what awaited the passengers of the train? Or would they end up as beggars on the streets? Did they have relatives in Mumbai who had promised to lend their rural cousins a hand? In any case, one thing was for sure: this train was a container of humanity ready to be dumped into the teeming ocean of life that was Mumbai. But if the passengers were just going to be dropped into the slums, the internment camps of poverty and despair, then they were on a journey out of the frying pan and into the fire. It brought to my mind the Nazi trains that transported Jews from the ghetto to the concentration camp.
The wheels started moving, rattling over the rails. It was a jarring ride—solid, but rough. A Kalashnikov of a train. It was hardly surprising that people occasionally fell from the roof on this sort of journey. A couple of hours sitting on the hard wooden benches and my ass was completely numb.
“I’m going to take a look at the prisoners,” I said. I stood up and walked toward the carriage behind me.
Two of our detachment were in with the prisoners, watching them closely, while the rest of us were split into two groups, guarding the carriages in front and behind respectively. We had made it safely out of the high danger zone about an hour ago and were now down to yellow alert. If Hindu India had been planning to attack us, they would have done so back there. Whatever they might have thought about losing their top leadership, it was unlikely that the remaining Hindu India paramilitary were about to go completely crazy and attempt a suicide charge into territory firmly under the control of the New India government, UN troops, and Eugene & Krupps.
When I arrived in the prisoners’ carriage, the apes all had their mouths shut, although they seemed to be taking their captivity in different ways. Some of them were paralyzed by fear the moment they stepped into the passenger car that was taking them to justice; others were trembling, some were indignant, and yet others tried to maintain a dignified silence—as if the monkeys had any dignity to begin with. The only thing they had in common was that they had become so accustomed to being switched off by the KO pads that they had learned not to show any sign of resistance.
One of the men, who had evidently determined that I was the leader of our detachment, opened his mouth. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we get to our destination. Do you really think the cowardly government troops will be able to contain us?”
“Oh, no need to worry about that,” I replied. “Your faithful followers won’t have much luck if they try and spring you from your cells. Panopticon’s secure facilities are like a cleaner version of Alcatraz.”
“Panopticon? We’re being taken to a private detention center?” he asked.
“A prison, strictly speaking. A correctional facility. Panopticon has been tasked to provide security for the New India government and the UN. You won’t find any of your ‘cowardly government troops’ in their facilities, I’m afraid. Only elite private military forces, handpicked for their experience and security know-how. They’re the best in the world. I wouldn’t count on being rescued, if I were you.”
The man didn’t seem to believe me—his eyebrows were raised in a silent smirk. He evidently had no idea that this sort of thing was standard practice these days. He was an old man. The ID spot check we performed when we arrested him told us that he had been a colonel in the old Indian army. He was a product of a different era, a time when the state still did everything.
I left the old man and moved toward the back of the carriage where John Paul was sitting on his own, next to a window covered with iron bars.
“Iron bars, eh? You did well to find a carriage like this,” John Paul said, staring out the window. He lifted up his bound hands and pointed at the scenery that was drifting by. “Look, that billboard there.”
I only managed to catch a glimpse before it flitted by: some writing in what I suppose would be called gothic script, with a heavy, angular font. It was superimposed over a realistic if somewhat old-fashioned painting of soldiers.
“I came up with that,” John Paul said. “The grammar of genocide isn’t always dependent on the content of the message. You can sneak it into the most innocuous of everyday conversations, if you want to. But it’s best if you can incorporate it into slogans and propaganda, like on that billboard back there. There grammar is at its most concentrated form. You can embed the grammar into sentences in different ways, with different degrees of concentration, but stirring messages like the one on that billboard really give you the opportunity to lay it on nice and thick and dense.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
“I have this little theory. Consider this. It’s not political extremism that leads to genocide. Rather it’s the need to prepare for genocide that makes people express their opinions in terms of political extremism.”
“What the hell? You’ve got it all fucked up,” I said.
“If by ‘fucked up’ you mean that I have my cause and effect the wrong way around, then yes, I agree with you. But then again, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the fact that all it takes is a few words for people to systematically start murdering each other is also ‘fucked up,’ as you put it.”
The Lord of Genocide shrugged.
Amber clouds hovered over the paddy fields outside. A pillar of light appeared in the distant forests, a Jacob’s Ladder. Were there more massacres going on over there, perhaps? Was God sucking up the souls of the innocent victims with a straw of light? The vista looked almost like a caricature—surely if there was a god up there waiting at the top of that, it would have been the one from Monty Python.
Time was nothing to me anymore. If you’d asked me what time of day it was I would only have been able to describe it as being “battle time.” A no-man’s land where your sense of time and emotion was masked by your BEAR. I found myself being drawn into the rhythm of the train, which made this already endless and timeless period stretch out even further and simultaneously pass in an instant. It was like wading through jelly, and yet completely normal and natural at the same time.
I was drawn back into the carriage by another piece of Hindu India agitprop out of the window. John Paul noticed that I was looking at it and spoke.
“You’ll notice how the picture to go with the slogan is rooted in the socialist realism school? I’ve noticed that beyond a certain point, right-wing and left-wing extremists alike tend to share the same aesthetic sensibilities, or should I say lack of—”
“You really are something else, aren’t you,” I interrupted calmly. “You fucking piece of shit. I’m not just talking about your genocides either. Even your friends over there, the fundamentalist nuts, you’ve been laughing at them while you used them as tools for your own ends.”
“And you can’t abide my looking down on them?” John Paul asked.
“Not just looking down on them—looking down on them and manipulating them into killing each other. At least they have the integrity to get their own hands dirty.”
“Yes. The problem is that I’ve committed myself to more than I could possibly do with my own little pair of hands. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to busy myself with the manual labor. But I do accept responsibility for everything they do,” John Paul said.
“They’ll be standing trial soon,” I said. “The ICC will see they take their share of the blame. But not you. You’re different.”
“Back to the National Military Establishment for me?”
“Exactly. And after that, even I don’t know.”
I stopped speaking to try and read John Paul’s reaction. Nothing. He didn’t show anything. No fear. No resignation.
After a little while, John Paul spoke again. “I’m thirsty. Could you get me a glass of water?”
“How about a glass of ‘quit your bitching or I’ll slap you with another KO pad,’ ” I said.
“How hospitable of you. I think I’ll pass.”
“Where’s Lucia?”
“Not here.”
“I know she’s not here, you fuck. That’s why I’m asking you where she is.”
John Paul shrugged. “How is that question relevant to your duty?”
“Maybe it’s not.” I felt myself getting more agitated, and my voice grew deeper and colder. “Maybe I just want Lucia.”
“And you’re prepared to kill as many children as it takes to get to her,” he said.
I looked at John Paul. It was ironic. This was the first time John Paul had ever revealed anything approaching a human emotion. Sure, that emotion might have been animosity toward me. And it did make me angrier still. But there was also a little part of me that was … relieved?
“Sure, it’s tough. But I was just doing my job.”
I tried to give as bland an answer as I could, but it made John Paul laugh out loud.
“Tough? You’re lying, and you know it. I know all about the emotion regulation that you go through before battle. So that you can kill children without worrying, either before or after. You don’t even feel any guilt as you pull the trigger. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I didn’t say anything.
“And ‘I was just doing my job’? Please. Have you any idea how many ordinary people, people who wouldn’t hurt a fly in their day-to-day lives, have used that as an excuse to commit the most cruel and brutal acts imaginable? The Nazis who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were ‘just doing their job.’ The East German border guards who shot their own countrymen dead for trying to cross the Berlin Wall were ‘just doing their job.’ Just doing your job, eh? Well, if everyone ‘just did their job’ then we wouldn’t have any need for soldiers or bodyguards. Jobs exist to paralyze the human conscience. Where did capitalism come from? The Protestant work ethic: do your job, save money, and God will be pleased with you. A job is a form of religion. The only thing that varies from person to person is how pious they are. Most people actually understand this on some level. They just don’t want to admit it to themselves.”